AI #194: Spy Versus Guy

Tomorrow I head to Washington DC for a conference called The Takeoff. If you are there, do come say hello. I will be giving a talk on how to keep up with AI given a limited time budget. This week has three big stories: The release of Claude Fable 5.2, Jensen Huang having an affair with a Chinese spy and the METR report on AI R&D acceleration. We also learned that GPT-6 Astra Underperforms on Safety Research Tasks. Table of Contents • Briefly on Claude Fable 5.2. • Briefly on Jensen Huang Having an Affair With a Chinese Spy. • Briefly on Accelerating AI R&D. • Language Models Offer Mundane Utility. • Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility. • Huh, Upgrades. • On Your Marks. • Choose Your Fighter. • Get My Agent on the Line. • Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon. • Fun With Media Generation. • Cyber Lack of Security. • The Hackening. • A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer. • Get Involved. • Introducing. • In Other AI News. • Show Me the Money. • Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble. • Quiet Speculations. • A Matter of Antitrust. • The Quest for Sane Regulations. • Donald Trump Remains Open to AI Guardrails. • Chip City. • The Week in Audio. • People Just Say Things. • It’s a Secret to Everyone. • Rhetorical Innovation. • Ellsberg’s Warning to Kissinger (Reprise). • Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence Is Difficult. • OpenAI’s Control Room. • Astra Looks Pretty Misaligned to Me. • Cooperative Alignment. • Please Speak Directly Into This Microphone. • The Lighter Side. Briefly on Claude Fable 5.2 Introducing the world’s most powerful model. No doubt it is a good model, sir. As always, we began with the model card. Mostly it told us what we would have expected from a model called Claude Fable 5.2. It clearly makes the numbers go up. There are some concerns. Some aspects seem what one might call underbaked, and Fable 5.2 is relatively vulnerable to some types of errors. It also has to compe